Food safety, lower sort loss and animal friendliness are key reasons that Hatfield Quality Meats has encouraged contractors and suppliers to adopt automatic sorting technology, according to Bob Ruth, president of Country View Family Farms, Hatfield’s production and procurement division.

Ruth says that having the flexibility to halt feeding several hours prior to shipping to market has the potential to impact food safety. When pigs have fasted prior to harvest, there is less chance for gut fill spill in the plant during evisceration. Automatic sorting technology gives producers a mechanism for withdrawing feed, recommended by meat scientists for 12 to 24 hours prior to harvest. The sorting technology makes it convenient to withdraw feed from animals marketed early without interrupting the rest of the pigs in the barn. The opportunity to perform feed withdrawal is just one of the benefits Ruth and his colleagues at Hatfield see in using automatic sorting. Reduced variation is another important benefit, according to Ruth. He says sort loss in sorting facilities has been reduced to half of what losses average in Country View’s other facilities. Ruth says contractors who grow pigs using automatic sorting facilities also applaud the technology for how easy it is to load pigs from the barns.

Animal friendliness is what first led Hatfield to consider large pens and automatic sorting, according to Ruth. Researchers have demonstrated that pigs in large pens are less likely to fight or create rigid social hierarchies. Pigs in large pens also have a better opportunity to pick their own microenvironments and flee from aggressive animals. This leads to pigs that are less stressed in the barn and packing plant.

“We saw that we could use this technology within the same footprint as our existing finisher barns but we thought it would be a more animal-friendly option,” says Ruth.